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Police tape and pigeons
Apr. 7th, 2007 09:41 amVery occasionally, I get spam whose title indicates it could easily be a real message from someone I know who's forgotten to log in.
Hard to believe it's only a two mile walk from mine to Poptimism, but apparently so, and in weather like yesterday's a very nice walk it is too, as Highbury shades into Islington into Clerkenwell, bank holiday boozers outside every pub. Alas, my summery mood is soon dispelled by the live acts; the country opener is perfectly pleasant, but he's followed by a desperately earnest singer-songwriter type, and then the Shimura Curves, who have somehow managed to get even worse since that Progress Bar show. Almost to the extent that it's mesmerising, the best accidental comedy band ever - but only almost. We're distracted from them for a while by the egg stuck on the ceiling, and later seek refuge in the 'Allo 'Allo boardgame - which is essentially Snakes & Ladders with more confusion and less skill, but is still mildly preferable to Shimura cocking Curves.
Downstairs, one of the three old men sat glowering at the bar falls off his stool, manages to stop at standing rather than falling to the floor, and says "Bill, please." It's not so much if as when, isn't it?
Back upstairs, MJ Hibbett effortlessly lifts the mood, even if he briefly thinks he'll get away with not playing 'Hey Hey 16K', the fool. Then Pop Focus Group, whose results I await with interest even if I suspect my contribution will rather have been pissing in the wind.
Also-ran author Blake Morrison plugs his new book with a musing on Tony Blair in fiction. His agenda is unclear and self-defeating, not to mention mired in the normal cliches of the confused Left, but one passage particularly stood out:
" Pat Barker's Regeneration and Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, both written 80 years on from action they describe, offer new insights into the first world war. But we wouldn't want to do without the poems of Owen and Sassoon, or from the second world war Primo Levi's If This Is a Man or Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead."
Which came out, respectively, in 1947 and 1948, after the war had finished. Cretin.
I am more excited than is probably wise about Sigue Sigue Sputnik at Stay Beautiful tonight.
Hard to believe it's only a two mile walk from mine to Poptimism, but apparently so, and in weather like yesterday's a very nice walk it is too, as Highbury shades into Islington into Clerkenwell, bank holiday boozers outside every pub. Alas, my summery mood is soon dispelled by the live acts; the country opener is perfectly pleasant, but he's followed by a desperately earnest singer-songwriter type, and then the Shimura Curves, who have somehow managed to get even worse since that Progress Bar show. Almost to the extent that it's mesmerising, the best accidental comedy band ever - but only almost. We're distracted from them for a while by the egg stuck on the ceiling, and later seek refuge in the 'Allo 'Allo boardgame - which is essentially Snakes & Ladders with more confusion and less skill, but is still mildly preferable to Shimura cocking Curves.
Downstairs, one of the three old men sat glowering at the bar falls off his stool, manages to stop at standing rather than falling to the floor, and says "Bill, please." It's not so much if as when, isn't it?
Back upstairs, MJ Hibbett effortlessly lifts the mood, even if he briefly thinks he'll get away with not playing 'Hey Hey 16K', the fool. Then Pop Focus Group, whose results I await with interest even if I suspect my contribution will rather have been pissing in the wind.
Also-ran author Blake Morrison plugs his new book with a musing on Tony Blair in fiction. His agenda is unclear and self-defeating, not to mention mired in the normal cliches of the confused Left, but one passage particularly stood out:
" Pat Barker's Regeneration and Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong, both written 80 years on from action they describe, offer new insights into the first world war. But we wouldn't want to do without the poems of Owen and Sassoon, or from the second world war Primo Levi's If This Is a Man or Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead."
Which came out, respectively, in 1947 and 1948, after the war had finished. Cretin.
I am more excited than is probably wise about Sigue Sigue Sputnik at Stay Beautiful tonight.
